Maestro Mark Padmore looks Bach at Kilkenny Arts Festival
THE streets are alive with the sound of Mozart in Kilkenny as this year’s arts festival is in the throes of the most extensive Mozartian season ever to take place in Ireland.
Wolfgang doesn’t hog the whole show, though, and the classical wunderkind gives way to the baroque master JS Bach in several programmes. Aficionados of great voices will be making a beeline for St Canice’s Cathedral when the English tenor Mark Padmore joins the resident ensemble Camerata Kilkenny for a rare night of arias, cantatas and instrumental works.
Padmore is considered to be one of the most cultured and intelligent tenors on the international scene, lauded for his scrupulous musicianship and intense and dramatic interpretations particularly in the role of evangelist in the Bach Passions.
On the selection for Kilkenny , Padmore elaborates. “It is a meditative and beautiful programme on a general theme of death and redemption that I really love and it seems to speak deeply to people,” he says.
“There are two complete cantatas. ‘Cantata 55 Ich armer Mensch’ is the only cantata among the surviving 200 or so works scored for a solo tenor. ‘Cantata 82 Ich Habe Genug’ was scored for bass solo but does have a precedent of being sung by different voice types. Bach himself transposed part of it in the Anna Magdalena Notebook.
It is an extraordinary piece of writing and each movement has something special in it. The single aria ‘Mein verlangen’ is a very beautiful yearning piece. I first sang it on the John Elliot Gardiner tour and wanted to sing it often ever since. To sing Bach is an endless journey of discovery. Every time I come back I am amazed at how deep the music is and I never tire of it”.
Does the sacred music of Bach speak to a modern secular audience in the same way as an 18th century Lutheran congregation?
“It is very important to address this question. I was struck when rehearsing Bach’s Passions that I rarely heard a conductor talk about anything to do with religion in preparing the performances. It was all about getting the music right until I worked with director Peter Sellars on the staged versions for Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.
“The Passions are all about suffering which we know is always with us and Sellars, during the rehearsal process talked about theology and the meaning in the music for us now and the music has such resonances for us now. At best, this music should be theologically and politically engaged. If you come away just thinking ‘Oh the voice was wonderful’, then I don’t get it.”.
The Kilkenny recital came about through Padmore’s friendship with Camerata Kilkenny members Maya Homburger and Barry Guy. Using strings and bows, the ensemble play instruments that sound closer to their 18th century equivalents than modern ones. The approach has generated a degree of controversy over the years. Padmore’s professional career has coincided with the evolution of early music movement.
“I think one of the great things the movement brought was a questioning attitude to the music. I do love the sound of period instruments but just because we play on old instruments doesn’t mean we are communicating in the strongest possible way,” he says.
Here he quotes TS Elliot to emphasise his point: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Padmore has been busy with his own St Endellion Festival in Cornwall where he is artistic director. A reminder of a formative musical experience for the teenage Padmore was the performance of Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’.
When I was 16, I went on tour with Kent Youth Orchestra and played clarinet for the ‘Enigma Variations’ in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. That was a wonderful event for me for and it was lovely to be reminded of that at this years’ festival.”
Unusually for a tenor of such prominence, his operatic work is fairly sparse. He was in his 50s when he took on a major role. Few who heard his portrayal of the tortured Captain Vere for Glyndebourne’s 2013 production of Billy Budd will forget it. In the cast was Clare tenor Dean Power, now a member of the Bavarian State Opera. “Mark is a really special artist,” says Power. “I learned so much from him. He is fearless in the search for expressing what he wants to communicate.”
This is Padmore’s second visit to Ireland this summer. He mesmerized audiences at West Cork with pianist Paul Lewis in recitals of Schubert and Janacek. “It was my first trip to Bantry and I absolutely loved it —such a vibrant and interesting festival.”
What next? “I love to listen to a wide range of genres and my siblings and teenage daughters keep me up to date. Next week we’re heading to Brecon to the Green Man Festival to listen to Laura Marling. That is going to be quite an experience.”
- Mark Padmore and Camerata Kilkenny tomorrow, Friday; 7.30pm, St Canice’s Cathedral
Kilkenny Arts Festival: Other highlights
Mozarts’s mature string quartets performed during lunchtime concerts by the Heath Quartet 10-14 Aug; Grand Opera Idomeneo at St Canice’s in first Irish performance since 1956. Gerard Schneider steps in for an indisposed John Mark Ainsley. Malcolm Proud presents rarely heard compositions for mechanical clockwork organ and other unusua l instruments.
Afternoon performances on a trail of garden spaces behind some of Kilkenny’s historic buildings. Mick O Dea continues his residency at James Stephens Barracks. People can drop in and watch the artist at work on festival portraits.
Martin Hayes has gathered a diverse group of Irish and American musicians for a mix of trad/jazz/bluegrass music and poetry , including Ricky Skaggs, below, piper David Power, sisters Maighread and Tríona Ní Domhnaill and Rachel and Becky Unthank, Loudain Wainwright III, Paul Muldoon, Doug Wiseman et al.
The French travelling ensemble has pitched its tent at County Hall for two presentations. They mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with a riotous take on the Bard in The Incomplete Works and their version of the cult masterpiece, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
This year’s Hubert Butler Lecture is given by John Gray on The Fragility of Freedom . Prof JP Mallory explores the Origins of the Irish.
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